


What We Worship

by Miri1984



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Afterlife, Death, Discussion of Afterlife, Grieving, Heavy on the angst, M/M, post 173
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:54:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26993986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miri1984/pseuds/Miri1984
Summary: I spent a week thinking the worst was going to happen so you get fic. (this was written post 173 but before 174)
Relationships: Grizzop drik Acht Amsterdam/Zolf Smith/Oscar Wilde, Zolf Smith/Oscar Wilde, if you squint a bit
Comments: 19
Kudos: 48





	What We Worship

Oscar dies first. There is a little bit of surprise there, that he is the one to fall, considering Zolf is so determined to put himself in front of every danger, so certain of his own strength and hardiness. Oscar always expected to hear the news from someone, tried his best to hide how he fretted whenever the dwarf was missing. Even before they’d acknowledged what was between them, as far back as Prague when he’d come upon them Zolf-less and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach at the thought that he might have missed something, forgotten something that could keep him safe.

Of course, there was always old age, but Oscar had known from very early on that age would not be the thing that shuffled him off the mortal coil. No. He lived too interesting a life for that to happen. And he was right.

Confusion comes with death. Because he doesn’t worship a god, not exactly, although enough of them have placed claims on him over the years. Dionysus, perhaps. Aphrodite. Hermes. 

He isn’t delivered into the realm of any of them, however. Instead, he’s greeted by a figure he’d never thought to see again.

Despite the crushing weight of grief for those he has left behind pressing behind his spectral eyes, he cannot help but smile.

“Well this isn’t regular at _all.”_

Grizzop looks much the same as he did in Damascus. Of course two thousand years in the afterlife couldn’t change him. Nothing else had managed.

“It’s good to see you Grizzop,” he says. 

“You got yourself killed,” Grizzop says. “I told you not to do that.”

“And you always know I take great delight in doing exactly the opposite of what you tell me.”

Grizzop’s eyes flash in something like amusement. In something like anger.

In something akin to fondness.

“They don’t know where to put you,” Grizzop says. “So I had a word with Artemis and she said you can guest with us for a while. At least until you sort yourself out.”

“What do you mean, I sort myself out?”

“Which domain, which god, come on Wilde you’re not thick, you never have been.”

“Will I have to hunt?” he asks, looking down at his clothes. Yes, of course, he is immaculately dressed, turquoise suit and golden waistcoat, utterly impractical shoes. “I’m hardly dressed for it.”

“We can postpone the hunt for a few years,” Grizzop says. “Unless you want to give it a try?”

Oscar tilts his head. He feels young again, unweighed down by the physical, and he wonders, briefly, if things had been different, maybe he would have enjoyed the hunt.

He concentrates, briefly, and is clothed in leather armour with a bow at his back.

Grizzop lets out a short bark of laughter. “Show off,” he says.

“I am a guest here,” Oscar says. “I should follow the customs.”

“My lady thinks you’re a dick,” Grizzop says then, tilting his head as though listening to something, or someone.

“Your lady is esteemable and almost certainly correct.”

“Come on then.”

Oscar lingers for a moment, wanting to look back, feeling the tug of connections, loss, pain.

He wants, very badly, to see Zolf again. 

“You can check in on them later,” Grizzop says, softly, and Oscar feels his hand gently rest on his arm. “Believe me, the first few days aren’t something you want to be close to.”

Oscar swallows down a lump, and follows Grizzop into the forest.

#

Time passes differently in the forest. Grizzop despairs of him ever learning not to give himself away on the hunt but Oscar finds he loves it here, amidst the trees.

He watches them, after a timeless interval. Watches them struggle through their tasks without him. And it hurts, a dull, throbbing ache of yearning that never quite leaves him.

“Why does it still hurt?” he asks Grizzop. “Surely in the afterlife I should be able to move on. Let go somehow.”

Grizzop is both different and exactly the same. There is wisdom there that wasn’t before, and it sometimes strikes Oscar how very very much older than him he is. 

“It’s because you don’t know where you belong yet,” Grizzop says. “You don’t know where to wait.”

“You always knew where you belonged.” 

Grizzop grins. “Kind of easy, when your Goddess knew you two thousand years before you were even born.”

Oscar blinks. Time moves differently here, and the paradoxical nature of what happened to Grizzop and Sasha never failed to give him the spiritual equivalent of a headache. “Where is Sasha?”

“Hephaestus,” Grizzop grins at that. “She’ll come visit eventually. When she’s not working on a project.”

Oscar grins. It does work. He thinks, briefly, of Cel and wonders how they’re doing. Then of course, his thoughts go back to Zolf, again, and his grin fades.

He looks back to find Grizzop’s ears tilted, his expression contemplative. 

“You’re thinking about him again.”

“Constantly,” Oscar says.

“Never would have figured you for such a sap.”

“Oh, Grizzop, don’t lie. You always knew it.”

Grizzop grins again. “Well. Yeah.” He gets up and touches Oscar’s shoulder. “Come on. Join the hunt for a while. It’ll get your mind off things.”

#

Grizzop isn’t always with him but does usually manage to show up whenever he feels himself sinking into wallowing. Self pitying thoughts about what life could have been, if he’d not been stupid enough to get himself killed. If they’d defeated the plague together instead of Oscar having to bow out early like a fool.

He’d had a plan in his head, oh far sooner than he would ever have admitted to Zolf, of a cottage by the sea, a writing desk and a library and a warm fire and a big kitchen. The sound of metal feet on stone flagstones. A bed, large enough to accommodate Oscar - who was an extravagant sleeper with a tendency to drape his limbs over whatever space was available, and Zolf, who would end up curled around him to stop him from flailing in nightmares.

He’d had a plan and then he’d gone and ruined it.

It’s usually at around this stage that Grizzop would appear and drag him off to chase deer or dire bears or something else and the thrill of the hunt did take him out of himself. But this time he feels the soft breath of forest wind and someone else is there.

He is a guest in this realm, and Artemis certainly doesn’t owe him any favours (he was the one who got Grizzop killed, after all, and surely that makes him less than top of her list of people hanging around in her realm while not actively worshipping her).

“I think I know why you’re here,” she says, and her voice is sharp and clean and cold, like wind that has come off snow in the mountains.

He swallows. “My lady,” he says. 

He used to be good at talking to royalty.

She gives a soft chuckle. “You do not worship gods, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.”

“I don’t?”

“No,” she says, and he feels a soft touch on his shoulder. He looks up into a face that is utterly impossible in its beauty. “You worship people. You worship connections. You worship the mortal world in all of its messiness.”

Oscar blinks. “Something I have to worship from afar then, I suppose,” he says, not surprised at the bitterness that laces his tone.

She squeezes his shoulder for a brief moment, and then she is gone, and Oscar is more miserable than before.

#

Sasha comes to visit and Oscar hugs her in a way she would never have allowed when she was alive. She doesn’t look the same, but then he thinks that no one does here. Grizzop looked the same, but he expected Grizzop to look that way, and in the end how could you possibly improve on something so sleek and refined, so suited for the hunt? Sasha still carries her scars but her hair is almost white and her face is far less guarded and Oscar remembers the letter and takes her shoulders in his hands and simply looks at her for a long, long moment, feeling tears gather in his eyes at being able to see the life she lived in the marks on her form.

“You’re beautiful,” he says, and she blushes at that.

“Gods, Wilde, I didn’t think you were into me,” she says, and he laughs and shakes his head.

He chucks her under the chin. A preposterous act, considering their age difference now. 

She lived longer than he did.

The thought of his own death for the first time ever, is a comfort. 

Of all of them, she deserved it.

“You look the same,” she says. She’d never seen his scar, of course, and that had gone when he’d died. 

“You flatter me,” he says. “I looked like shit last time we met.”

“Well yeah,” she says. “But you had reasons. I like the new clothes. Grizzop’s got you hunting with him?”

“He does.”

“I would have figured you for Dionysus. Or Hermes.”

“Funnily enough, I would have figured you for Hermes as well,” Oscar says. “But…?”

“Had to build a lot, after I went back,” she says. “It’s funny how interesting it is, to see the start of things. To realise how far we’d come. You know the first lock I picked in Rome? Could have done it with no tools and my eyes closed. You get to thinking how things work, and how they can make stuff better for everyone, and well, Hephaestus loves tinkering and I love it too. So.”

“We find our place,” Oscar says.

She looks at him, and when did she become the wisest person he had ever met? 

Who is he kidding? She always was.

“You haven’t found yours,” she says. 

He sighs and looks back. She puts a hand on his arm, before he can look where he really wants to. “Or maybe yours hasn’t come to you yet,” she says, and she is smiling a little at that.

“What do you mean by that?”

She grins, and he forgets the question in the joy of seeing Sasha happy. There is something so utterly and entrancingly right about it, her smile, and for a second - the briefest, tiniest moment - he can see eternity.

But it isn’t quite right, and although they spend a timeless age with each other, and although he laughs and loves… it never quite sits in the place it needs to for him to lose the restless ache that has been with him ever since he died.

There is a lack. Something. Someone. Missing.

#

He dies. It’s nothing special. Death isn’t special and he’s come to realise that over the years, after so many losses, so many dead. 

He kept going because that’s what you did. There was always someone else to help, always something to hope for.

He’d been surprised, when Wilde died, that his power hadn’t died with him. They’d had plans. They’d had a future, and Zolf had, sometimes, wondered if that future had been the basis for his powers. But no, even in the depths of his despair (and they had been very, very deep) he hadn’t lost the hope that gave him his powers and he’d been more confused than ever at that. 

What was it, in the end, that gave him hope? He honestly doesn’t know. He’d lost so much and yet it persisted. It was more insidious than Posiedon, although less insistent.

His power had stayed. Even after he’d lost Oscar. After the battles against the infection. After everything. 

And perhaps that hope had lasted too long. Perhaps hope needed bitterness, perhaps hope needed things to be bad in order for someone to yearn towards something better.

But the measure of his mortal years weren’t for him to assess.

Because he dies.

He dies and he finds himself in a forest, face to face with a goblin, who looks annoyed.

“Well I don’t know why he isn’t here to meet you,” the goblin says. 

“Who are you?”

The goblin’s ears flick and he looks even more annoyed. “You know, I only worked for him for a month, less than, I don’t know why I’m supposed to be his secretary in the afterlife. It’s speciest, is what it is and…”

“Grizzop?” Zolf says, putting two and two together. Making five. Or whatever. 

“I mean, yeah. Wotcher and all that. Welcome to the realm of Artemis?”

“Why the fuck am I in the realm of Artemis?” 

“Cos that’s where he is, except that he isn’t right now and I’m trying to…”

“He?”

Grizzop stops and looks at Zolf for a moment, head tilted. Zolf had known a few goblins in his lifetime. Vesseek for one, and Vesseek had told him a lot about Grizzop, given him something of a picture of the person he could now see, but nothing could quite prepare him for the sheer energy of him. 

“You’re as stupid as he is,” Grizzop says, bluntly, and Zolf decides he likes him _immensely._

“All right, I know who you mean,” Zolf says. “And…” he sighs. “And I think I know why he isn’t here.”

“Really? Cos that means you’re ahead of the game on me and I’m practically an angel.”

Zolf looks around the clearing they are in, finding a suitable rock, and goes to it to sit down. As he moves, he realises he doesn’t feel the familiar clunking of his prosthetics. A thousand aches and pains of age have left him but that, _that_ is the thing that makes him realise he is dead. He looks down, almost expecting to see his legs restored to him, and finds, to his utter surprise, that no. There are his mechanical legs. The same ones that went through the storm that killed Wilde, one lurid and green, the other sickly white. The fact that they don’t hurt any more is apparently the only thing that death will fix.

“They’re not real except in your head,” Grizzop says, sounding impatient. “You’re gonna see what you expect to see. Feel what you expect to feel. That's how it works.”

Zolf raises an eyebrow. “So they’re gonna hurt again?”

“Not unless you really want them to,” Grizzop says. “Some people keep pain with them, here, but… well some people need it. And some people never knew what it was like to be without it and it takes them a while to learn to let go.”

Zolf settles on the rock, crossing his legs - and that’s something he hasn’t been able to do for at least a decade, so it’s good to know he’s not attached to his old lack of flexibility. 

“What are you doing?”

“He’s sulking,” Zolf says. “I’m good at waiting him out.”

“He’s been waiting for you for more than a century!”

Zolf shuts his eyes, a smile touching his lips. “He’s never been very patient,” he says.

He hears Grizzop mutter something under his breath, and then he is alone.

There is a gentle, pine scented breeze that ruffles his hair and he thinks he hears the edge of a gentle chuckle.

Zolf feels safe, and comfortable, and without pain.

He can wait.

#

It doesn’t take that long, really, in the scheme of things, although time is different here and Zolf is content in the knowledge that the wait will be worth it.

When he opens his eyes and sees Oscar, though, his breath catches in his throat.

He’s wearing leather armor and there is a bow on his back, and his hair is caught back in a braid (like the ones that Zolf used to do for him, in Japan, when his hair was too long and he couldn’t bring himself to cut it, when he spilled everything that went on in Damascus to him while Zolf carded his hands through the smooth strands and wished he had the courage to do more than just murmur agreement) and he looks every inch the wary hunter, despite the fact that his bow isn’t in his hands.

“You just gonna stand there?” Zolf says. “It’s been more than a hundred years since you fucking left me, and you’re just gonna stand there and look at me?”

He takes a step forward. And then another.

“I wasn’t sure,” he says, and his voice is soft and gentle. The voice Zolf remembers from late nights when it was only the two of them, none of the pretense and edge to it that coloured every other interaction.

“Sure of what?”

“Sure you’d come.”

“Why not?”

“I left,” Oscar says, and he takes another step towards Zolf. “And you had so much more life to live. You didn’t have to do it… waiting for me.”

Zolf shuts his eyes for a minute and basks in the sheer stupidity. There is something very, very comforting in it.

Then he stands up and runs at Oscar Wilde, barrelling the tall idiot into the grass of the clearing and peppering him with kisses.

#

“Are you telling me you weren’t with anyone else at all?” Oscar says, eventually, and Zolf smiles against his chest. 

“No,” he says. “There _were_ a few others, but I was alive for a century and while I’m not a horny bugger like you I’m not going to turn down comfort and pleasure when it’s freely offered.” Oscar tenses a little, and Zolf’s smile turns into a grin. “You’re jealous,” he says.

“Well yes.”

“As if I don’t know you and that Grizzop fellow aren’t…”

“Grizzop and I have a strictly professional relationship,” Oscar says and Zolf has to resist the urge to headbutt him in the chest. He’s too comfortable, so he doesn’t.

“It’s good to know you’re still clueless,” he says instead.

“Grizzop is more than a thousand years old,” Oscar points out, and Zolf just murmurs assent into his skin, planting kisses on Oscar’s chest, absently.

“So he’s afraid of taking advantage of you.”

Oscar snorts at that, but his fingers are tangled in Zolf’s hair and his heart isn’t in it.

“So do we stay here?” Oscar asks, finally. “I’ve been waiting and they keep telling me this isn’t where I’m supposed to end up and I don’t actually know where…”

Zolf props himself up on one elbow, and looks down at Oscar, who is beautiful and open and everything he remembers and more. 

“I don’t worship a god, Oscar,” he says, softly, smoothing hair behind Oscar’s ear, glorying in the feel of him under his hand. 

“I don’t either,” Oscar says, tilting his head towards Zolf’s hand, eyes closing, a soft, beautiful hint of breath huffing from his lips.

“You worshipped the world you served,” Zolf says, softly. “You worshipped poetry and beauty and music.”

“Are you sure I worshipped it, or did I simply serve it?” Oscar says, playfully.

“Aren’t they the same thing?”

Oscar stills the hand that has been smoothing over Zolf’s shoulder, following the lines of his tattoos, patterns utterly familiar to his fingers despite the century since they’ve made them. “No,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

Zolf resettles against Oscar, beard tickling his neck. 

“Don’t tell Grizzop,” Zolf says, “but worshipping anything is a mug’s game, Oscar Wilde. Why not just be happy with what you have?”

As if Zolf had spoken a spell, the air around them shimmers and changes, and Oscar blinks, and between one second and the next, they are somewhere else.

#

_There is a cottage, on some cliffs at the edge of the ocean. It has stone floors and a fireplace and a well appointed kitchen that has produced some of the most elaborate and unnecessary feasts this side of eternity. The beds are large and there are many of them, to account for the vast array of guests of every species who come to stay there. Some for a week. Some for a month, a year, a decade._

_Hope lives there._


End file.
